Coffee & Geography Season 6 Episode 9
Nava contacted me because she wanted to use one of my graphics in a curriculum project. We jumped on a call, had a good chat, and I mentioned the podcast. Nava hadn’t been on one before, so she said yesm and I’m really glad she did!
Nava is the Executive Director of the Climate Education Centre, a new non‑profit building “holistic, action‑orientated climate education for youth around the globe.” The thing I appreciated immediately was how practical her thinking is, as she talked about what young people are actually experiencing: overwhelm, fear, and the feeling that the problem is too big to touch.
A big part of Nava’s perspective comes from growing up in Saipan in the Mariana Islands, near the Mariana Trench. She described childhood shaped by nature as the default in the sense that the island’s reality made certain things obvious. If your recreation is the ocean and your landscape is small and close, it’s harder to pretend nature is “somewhere else.”
She also talked about the islands’ complex history: Spanish, German, Japanese, and American influence, and the heavy, often tragic impacts on Indigenous communities. That history matters because it helps explain why “climate justice” can’t be an optional add‑on. You can’t talk about climate impacts without also talking about who has been harmed, who holds power, and who gets listened to.
One of the strongest parts of the episode was Nava’s story about being nine years old and trying to do something local that felt within reach. She described an organisation called Beautify CNMI (Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands) and how, when she was nine, raised money to help restore a neglected lighthouse near her home. It mattered to her because it was part of the landscape, part of local history, and it had become a place of abandonment and rubbish. For Nava, it was an early sign of what she later realised had always been a need to act, and a belief that community effort makes change possible.
The Climate Education Centre was co‑founded with her mum, and that origin story says a lot about their approach. Nava’s mum has a long background in education (including Montessori), and during COVID she retired from teaching but didn’t want to stop working. Nava, meanwhile, was trying to find stable work in climate and human rights spaces. Their “why don’t we create curriculum?” wasn’t actually a hit suggestion with Nava immediately. Actually, she said education wasn’t a space she had ever planned to work in. But the more she and her mum talked, the clearer the gap became.
Through my own experience as a climate science communicator and ex-high school Geography teacher, I’m in complete agreement with Nava when she said a lot of existing climate education is “mostly focused on the science.” The science is important, but it’s incomplete without the human side: Indigenous knowledge, justice, emotion, agency, and practical pathways forward. She also described wanting curriculum that isn’t a textbook but something built with activities, projects, and creative mediums like film, music and art as genuine ways to help young people process what they’re learning.
The listener questions took us into some topical hot territory, especially around geopolitical conflict. Nava said plainly that the headlines are dominated by conflict and war, and that climate stories can disappear under that weight, even though the environmental costs of conflict are enormous and the values underneath both crises often overlap: “a lack of respect for each other, for human life,” and the failure to see ourselves as “1 human family.”
The idea of the ‘one human family’ came up repeatedly, and it’s something that has always reasonated with me (Brexit, as an example, was heartbreaking, and I consider myself a global citizen rather than anything nationalistic). It’s also where Nava answered a question about “spiritual principles” in a grounded way, centering virtues and morals: recognising that where you are born is largely random, and that no one has more inherent right to safety than someone else. It’s a direct way of explaining what people sometimes clumsily call “privilege” (I include myself in that!).
Near the end, Nava shared two concrete examples of young people driving climate resilience: one involving a group of Pacific Island university students bringing a case to the ICJ, and another involving high‑school‑age students in Hawai‘i using legal action to push change around transportation emissions. Her point wasn’t that young people should have to carry this (we both strongly feel that they shouldn’t), but that they often do because they can’t afford to wait.
What stuck with me most was how Nava framed hope without being naïve about it. She repeated something she heard at the European Climate Pact event: “The climate change and the climate crisis is this generation’s big problem, right?” Previous generations faced world wars, plagues, civil wars. Those felt insurmountable too. The fact we’re here now doesn’t mean everything worked out perfectly; it means humans have a track record of surviving crises and rebuilding.
Links to explore:
🔗 Climate Education Centre: https://climateducation.org
🔗 European Climate Pact: https://climate-pact.europa.eu/
🔗 ICJ to Deliver Advisory Opinion on Climate Change: https://sdg.iisd.org/news/icj-to-deliver-advisory-opinion-on-climate-change/
🔗 Beautify CNMI: https://www.facebook.com/beautifycnmi/
🔗 Marianas Eye (March 28, 2008) Nava Khorram: Environmental Champion: https://marianaseye.blogspot.com/2008/03/nava-khorram-environmental-champion.html
🔗 Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) overview: https://www.doi.gov/oia/islands/cnmi
Geogramblings 